The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Mofo - WTF!!! Jeeeezuuuuus! I DOUBLE DARE YOU TO SHRINK THAT DOWN AND MAKE THAT YOUR SIG, IF EVEN JUST FOR A SHORT WHILE!! Where did you find that kickass picture - oh I know, google again! WOW!!!!

 

NO I originally posted it as a link!!! LOL. You know for a Harvard Guy you use some remedial English skills...

...gm

 

I don't mean to sound like an ATI fanboy, but I give you this graph:


Provided by http://www.driverheaven.net

Crossfire X not working in this title, but in all honesty, 100+ fps, it's not needed...

 

One 4870X2> 2x GTX280

 

Certainly does in this bench.
I quite like this one:

 

In that one GTX280 SLI> 4870X2

 

What is this, obvious day? lol


This should answer some of the calls that the HD4870X2 should be compared to two GTX280s...
Maybe it should, but it's half the price!

 

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say to Russ. Give it a month and both will be the same price. From a price perspective, two 4870X2s should be compared to 2x GTX280s.

 

That's where the stumbling block is, Quad crossfire doesn't scale quite as well as dual SLI. However, the cards are so powerful, that realistically they're CPU bound anyway, even by 4Ghz quad cores, at frame rates that are indistinguishable, so for the moment, there's very little reason to use more than an HD4870X2 anyway, with the exception of Age of Conan, and possibly Lost Planet: Colonies, although even that I'm dubious of. I'm not including Crysis because dual graphics don't scale with it very well anyway.

 

That is why maxing Crysis at anything above 1680 x 1050 is still not realistic. I'd say we'll have to wait for the Radeon HD5870/GeForce 10 series before it becomes truly feasible on a sub-$2000 budget. Heck I was only able to get 35FPS at that res with heavy tweaking and settings that are nowhere near max.

Still, Crysis is very pleasing to the eye despite it's terrible performance. If it had performed better, even sammorris might have a much higher opinion of the graphics. As it stands, the graphics are nice, but in no way justify the terrible performance even on hardcore multi-card rigs.

Allow me, if you will, to compare Crysis graphically to other games going by each aspect of detail.

Textures - Matched by Quake 4 and Episode 2 easily. Quake 4 still has some of the most impressive character clothing/skin textures I have ever seen. And Episode 2 has some excellent artwork going on that puts both other games to shame. Though, enabling POM actually improves a large amount of the muddier textures in Crysis dramatically.

Models - IMO unmatched. Crysis has some extremely impressive model detail. Most notably in the faces of the Korean soldiers and the nano-suits on your comrades. Games like CoD4 get close but not quite as good.

Lighting - Very nice but not impressive. Things like the absence of shadows in lightbeams kind of kill the overall experience of running around in the jungle at night. The HDR is very nice though and hands-down beats the sometimes overused specular mapping in CoD4. Crysis feels more natural overall but Episode 2 feels even more so due to the inclusion of features absent in Crysis.

That's just some of the aspects of graphics. Crysis looks amazing at times but isn't quite as consistent as CoD and HL2. So even at my tweaked settings, I'm still getting ~85-90% of the overall experience.

 

I wasn't aware that Lost Planet was that demanding. I played it maxed at native res without AA. Presumably if I got another card for SLI, I could run it maxed with heavy AA, let alone if I got a 4870X2.

 

There you go, boozer, you got the h-bomb pic from greensman. So shrink it a little more, and use it as your sig for a week - I DARE YOU! (Oh, greensman wants some more "remedial" english - I f**ing double-dare you m*f*k*r WTF!! Jeezzzz lueezzzzz! - gm are we good now? - just kidding.) Lol

What are the relative economics of that - a 4870x2 is about $300, and two gtx280s cost how much? Oh, Sam says half - so $300 vs $600??

Estuansis, very nice analysis of crysis - once I get my 3850 (yeah I'm still back in the stone age compared to you guys) I will buy the crysis full game - I've played the demo already. So you're actually telling me that at night, in crysis, you don't get shadows in light beams, like vehicle lights, or flashlights, or camp lights? Hmmmm. How could they have left that out? Also, I could google, but what is HDR again - you were making a comparison to COD4 which I am very familiar with. Thanks, Rich

 

I didn't get that pic from him... I googled it.

 

Yep, no shadows in lightbeams, but shadows for everything else. It's kinda fake feeling when you walk through vehicle headlights and there is no shadow at all.

HDR is High Dynamic Range lighting. It's a method of dynamically adjusting the contrast and brightness when you move from shadows to light. It also gives Crysis its bright sun-kissed glow in sunny environments. Whereas CoD4 depends entirely on weak HDR and specular maps(shiny weapons and characters) for its lighting.

 

Lostlanet colonies is an nvidia only titles,Estuansis, on an 8800 you'd do alright, but ATI cards take a good 30% performance hit from it so find it difficult to max the game. A GTX280 would still struggle at 2560x1600 with AA though, the game is pretty demanding.
As for maxing Crysis, it's playable at 1920x1200 if you have an HD4870X2, or a GTX280 for that matter, if you're willing to get frame dips every now and then. On a good CPU with up to date drivers, the HD4870X2 can get an average 40fps at 1920x1200 all Very High in Crysis - no AA of course, but that's a significant step up. For those of us who use XP still, I imagine running the game in DX9 but with the hacked very high settings could probably turn AA on and get the same performance. You'd be unlikely to see much above 40fps average on the radeons due to the CPU overhead.
What I'll say about the graphics of Crysis is that they have great potential - for two reasons, firstly the obvious, how badly it runs, but secondly, the errors. A large proportion of the game is nice, and if only the Anti-Aliasing was a little more effective (such that it actually anti-aliased more than a quarter of the textures) and there weren't random 640x480 textures in it, it would be nice. You have this beautiful environment with all these high res textures in it, then out of the blue comes this Quake 3 look-a-like. Why do that? If you use Vista or hacked settings, you can have very high shadows, but anything other than very high is pure ass on a stick, the resolution of shadows is appalling, they look hideous, so I turn them completely off and earn myself some higher shader detail, which does make the game look a lot better (had to turn it back down again after Core though, from then on the game halves in speed) - As far as faces go, I think Crysis takes the biscuit, I've not seen faces quite like those in any game yet, they're pretty good in titles like Rainbow Six Vegas, but the rest of the graphics are naff in that game, so irrelevent really.
It's interesting that you mention Quake 4, that game can look seriously good, and can still seriously whore a system to its knees, it got pretty demanding, even in multiplayer sometimes, I think it's due to the memory involved, Quake 4 is number two in the list of game
s that eat video memory.

Erm, Rich? An HD4870X2 is $500, not $300. You thinking of the normal HD4870?
HDR = High dynamic range - makes high contrasts between light and dark look a lot better, for example flashlights in the dark (from HL2:E2, turn on HDR and watch your frame rate sink when you do that.... the only time I got 9fps in Half life 2), to sunscapes outside, making better use of how bright the sun REALLY is, as opposed to knowing it's there by the textures being bright, you can see it's there, it's a potent light source that has a blinding effect on you.

edited: crap formatting.

 

So who's top dog of the new generation?
Chart follows:

1920x1200
GTX280 OC vs HD4870X2: 93/136, 64/100, 62/93, 110/101, 74/103, 75/78 TOTAL SCORE 478 / 611

2560x1600
GTX280 OC vs HD4870X2: 65/90, 50/108, 43/61, 72/60, 68/94, 57/71 TOTAL SCORE 355 / 484
GTX280SLI OC vs HD4870X4: 121/149, 91/102, 84/106, 127/101, 95/106, 80/70 TOTAL SCORE 598 / 634


Tests:
Call of Duty 4(4xAA,16xAF), GRiD(4xAA*,16xAF), World in Conflict (4xAA,4xAF), GRAW 2 (0xAA,16xAF), Oblivion (4xAA*,16xAF), Assassins Creed (0xAA) - all at max settings
* - 8x for 1920x1200 test

Lost Planet Colonies 1920x1200 16xAF
GTX280 OC vs HD4870X2 0xAA: 77/79
GTX280 OC vs HD4870X2 4xAA: 66/77
GTX280SLI vs HD4870X4 4xAA: 110/95
Total score 253 nvidia, 251 ATI

Crysis 1920x1200 0xAA 0xAF (Very High)
GTX280 OC: 28
HD4870 X2: 39
HD4870 X4: 42
GTX280SLI: 52
Total score 80 nvidia, 81 ATI

Total score for all Tests:
nvidia GTX280 series: 1764 frames
ATI HD4870X2 series: 2061 frames

I daresay that's pretty conclusive.

 

Demanding for sure. In really intensive parts I've seen my FPS slow to a crawl. I usually average 35-40FPS though which is made even smoother by the decent motion blur. Plus, you can drop a few negligible settings and boost frames a bit without any noticeable loss in IQ.

I know exactly what you mean. It looks nice overall and is sometimes jaw-dropping. But it only takes a few ugly rocks and buildings here and there to make it seem more fake than it should. The fact that it generally looks stunning though, gives it some leeway in my opinion of the game. I'll also have to agree that the AA is almost useless. So much so that I will probably never bother trying to run it with AA.

The actual shadows in the game never bothered me. I'm not sensitive to the low shadow res, so I am just as happy to run with medium shadows. Removing shadows entirely drastically ruined the look of the game for me.

The faces in Crysis are indeed amazing. You can see every pore and hair on their skin. And the range of emotional expressions is equally impressive. The faces and character models in RS Vegas are also very nice, but I agree that the rest of the game is pretty unremarkable.

My only issue with Quake 4 is the FPS drops in some areas. I go from locked 60FPS to a choppy 28 in some areas for seemingly no reason at all. But these aren't all that common in the game and thus, didn't ruin it for me. Quake 4 definitely beats out Doom 3 in the graphics department, but like Crysis, there are a few(but less obvious than Crysis) ugly areas.

The character textures are fantastic and very detailed. For a good example of this, take a look at the camo patterns on the Marines' clothes. I think the generally super awesome textures have a lot to do with eating so much vmem.

 

Indeed they do, and that's my hypothesis for the frame drops you mentioned - I've had them as well.

 

The all important screenshot in 'Under the Radar' saw me get 24fps maxed out with the HD3870, I get 45 with my 4870, up to 60 when I look around, versus up to 32 with the 3870... A pleasing result!

Crysis, all settings high (shadows and shaders included), Core:
beginning scene: 28-32fps
dark caves: 19-25fps
main sector: 14-16fps

In other news, the HD4870 appears to restore support for older games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. More on this as I test it.

 

It would help if you posted the resolution too. Is it at native res, 1920 res, or what?

If that's at native res, that's awesome. It means I should have no problem playing my native res buttery smooth with my tweaked settings.